The Gene Ontology: enhancements for 2011.

The Gene Ontology (GO) (http://www.geneontology.org) is a community bioinformatics resource that represents gene product function through the use of structured, controlled vocabularies. The number of GO annotations of gene products has increased due to curation efforts among GO Consortium (GOC) groups, including focused literature-based annotation and ortholog-based functional inference. The GO ontologies continue to expand and improve as a result of targeted ontology development, including the introduction of computable logical definitions and development of new tools for the streamlined addition of terms to the ontology. The GOC continues to support its user community through the use of e-mail lists, social media and web-based resources

The Gene Ontology resource: enriching a GOld mine.

The Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) provides the most comprehensive resource currently available for computable knowledge regarding the functions of genes and gene products. Here, we report the advances of the consortium over the past two years. The new GO-CAM annotation framework was notably improved, and we formalized the model with a computational schema to check and validate the rapidly increasing repository of 2838 GO-CAMs. In addition, we describe the impacts of several collaborations to refine GO and report a 10% increase in the number of GO annotations, a 25% increase in annotated gene products, and over 9,400 new scientific articles annotated. As the project matures, we continue our efforts to review older annotations in light of newer findings, and, to maintain consistency with other ontologies. As a result, 20 000 annotations derived from experimental data were reviewed, corresponding to 2.5% of experimental GO annotations. The website (http://geneontology.org) was redesigned for quick access to documentation, downloads and tools. To maintain an accurate resource and support traceability and reproducibility, we have made available a historical archive covering the past 15 years of GO data with a consistent format and file structure for both the ontology and annotations

The Gene Ontology Resource: 20 years and still GOing strong.

The Gene Ontology resource (GO; http://geneontology.org) provides structured, computable knowledge regarding the functions of genes and gene products. Founded in 1998, GO has become widely adopted in the life sciences, and its contents are under continual improvement, both in quantity and in quality. Here, we report the major developments of the GO resource during the past two years. Each monthly release of the GO resource is now packaged and given a unique identifier (DOI), enabling GO-based analyses on a specific release to be reproduced in the future. The molecular function ontology has been refactored to better represent the overall activities of gene products, with a focus on transcription regulator activities. Quality assurance efforts have been ramped up to address potentially out-of-date or inaccurate annotations. New evidence codes for high-throughput experiments now enable users to filter out annotations obtained from these sources. GO-CAM, a new framework for representing gene function that is more expressive than standard GO annotations, has been released, and users can now explore the growing repository of these models. We also provide the \u27GO ribbon\u27 widget for visualizing GO annotations to a gene; the widget can be easily embedded in any web page

Gene Ontology Consortium: going forward.

The Gene Ontology (GO; http://www.geneontology.org) is a community-based bioinformatics resource that supplies information about gene product function using ontologies to represent biological knowledge. Here we describe improvements and expansions to several branches of the ontology, as well as updates that have allowed us to more efficiently disseminate the GO and capture feedback from the research community. The Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) has expanded areas of the ontology such as cilia-related terms, cell-cycle terms and multicellular organism processes. We have also implemented new tools for generating ontology terms based on a set of logical rules making use of templates, and we have made efforts to increase our use of logical definitions. The GOC has a new and improved web site summarizing new developments and documentation, serving as a portal to GO data. Users can perform GO enrichment analysis, and search the GO for terms, annotations to gene products, and associated metadata across multiple species using the all-new AmiGO 2 browser. We encourage and welcome the input of the research community in all biological areas in our continued effort to improve the Gene Ontology

The Gene Ontology project in 2008.

The Gene Ontology (GO) project (http://www.geneontology.org/) provides a set of structured, controlled vocabularies for community use in annotating genes, gene products and sequences (also see http://www.sequenceontology.org/). The ontologies have been extended and refined for several biological areas, and improvements to the structure of the ontologies have been implemented. To improve the quantity and quality of gene product annotations available from its public repository, the GO Consortium has launched a focused effort to provide comprehensive and detailed annotation of orthologous genes across a number of 'reference' genomes, including human and several key model organisms. Software developments include two releases of the ontology-editing tool OBO-Edit, and improvements to the AmiGO browser interface

The Gene Ontology (GO) project in 2006.

The Gene Ontology (GO) project (http://www.geneontology.org) develops and uses a set of structured, controlled vocabularies for community use in annotating genes, gene products and sequences (also see http://song.sourceforge.net/). The GO Consortium continues to improve to the vocabulary content, reflecting the impact of several novel mechanisms of incorporating community input. A growing number of model organism databases and genome annotation groups contribute annotation sets using GO terms to GO's public repository. Updates to the AmiGO browser have improved access to contributed genome annotations. As the GO project continues to grow, the use of the GO vocabularies is becoming more varied as well as more widespread. The GO project provides an ontological annotation system that enables biologists to infer knowledge from large amounts of data

The Gene Ontology in 2010: extensions and refinements.

The Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium (http://www.geneontology.org) (GOC) continues to develop, maintain and use a set of structured, controlled vocabularies for the annotation of genes, gene products and sequences. The GO ontologies are expanding both in content and in structure. Several new relationship types have been introduced and used, along with existing relationships, to create links between and within the GO domains. These improve the representation of biology, facilitate querying, and allow GO developers to systematically check for and correct inconsistencies within the GO. Gene product annotation using GO continues to increase both in the number of total annotations and in species coverage. GO tools, such as OBO-Edit, an ontology-editing tool, and AmiGO, the GOC ontology browser, have seen major improvements in functionality, speed and ease of use

Expansion of the Gene Ontology knowledgebase and resources

The Gene Ontology (GO) is a comprehensive resource of computable knowledge regarding the functions of genes and gene products. As such, it is extensively used by the biomedical research community for the analysis of -omics and related data. Our continued focus is on improving the quality and utility of the GO resources, and we welcome and encourage input from researchers in all areas of biology. In this update, we summarize the current contents of the GO knowledgebase, and present several new features and improvements that have been made to the ontology, the annotations and the tools. Among the highlights are 1) developments that facilitate access to, and application of, the GO knowledgebase, and 2) extensions to the resource as well as increasing support for descriptions of causal models of biological systems and network biology. To learn more, visit http://geneontology.org/

The Gene Ontology Resource: 20 years and still GOing strong.

The Gene Ontology resource (GO; http://geneontology.org) provides structured, computable knowledge regarding the functions of genes and gene products. Founded in 1998, GO has become widely adopted in the life sciences, and its contents are under continual improvement, both in quantity and in quality. Here, we report the major developments of the GO resource during the past two years. Each monthly release of the GO resource is now packaged and given a unique identifier (DOI), enabling GO-based analyses on a specific release to be reproduced in the future. The molecular function ontology has been refactored to better represent the overall activities of gene products, with a focus on transcription regulator activities. Quality assurance efforts have been ramped up to address potentially out-of-date or inaccurate annotations. New evidence codes for high-throughput experiments now enable users to filter out annotations obtained from these sources. GO-CAM, a new framework for representing gene function that is more expressive than standard GO annotations, has been released, and users can now explore the growing repository of these models. We also provide the 'GO ribbon' widget for visualizing GO annotations to a gene; the widget can be easily embedded in any web page

The Gene Ontology's Reference Genome Project: a unified framework for functional annotation across species.

The Gene Ontology (GO) is a collaborative effort that provides structured vocabularies for annotating the molecular function, biological role, and cellular location of gene products in a highly systematic way and in a species-neutral manner with the aim of unifying the representation of gene function across different organisms. Each contributing member of the GO Consortium independently associates GO terms to gene products from the organism(s) they are annotating. Here we introduce the Reference Genome project, which brings together those independent efforts into a unified framework based on the evolutionary relationships between genes in these different organisms. The Reference Genome project has two primary goals: to increase the depth and breadth of annotations for genes in each of the organisms in the project, and to create data sets and tools that enable other genome annotation efforts to infer GO annotations for homologous genes in their organisms. In addition, the project has several important incidental benefits, such as increasing annotation consistency across genome databases, and providing important improvements to the GO's logical structure and biological content